Illustration:Andrew Dyson
That’s because my academic work was studying the roots of violence,where research overwhelmingly identifies factors like humiliation,shame and guilt as motivating drivers,not a lack of respect. When the literature mentions respect at all,it isn’t about the perpetrator disrespecting the victim:it’s more about the perpetrator feeling someone had disrespectedthem. Thus could James Gilligan – a prison psychiatrist working with America’s most violent men for 35 years – conclude he was “yet to see a serious act of violence that was not provoked by the experience of feeling shamed or humiliated,disrespected and ridiculed”. Gilligan’s language is strikingly absolute:“all violence is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem”,and direct:“the most dangerous men on earth are those who are afraid they are wimps”.
Still,I withheld my scepticism for a few reasons. For one,it felt momentous just to see a prime minister put this on the agenda. Also,the people emphasising disrespect almost certainly have expertise that I don’t. And,it can be possible to work gender into violence analysis,roughly as follows:hierarchical gender norms,in which women are assumed inferior,lead men to feel humiliation,shame and disrespect when women don’t behave like their supplicants. They also lead men to think violence is the best way to restore their self-esteem. By this logic,perhaps if we established a more gender-equal culture,the humiliation would dissipate and violence would reduce.
But the nagging feeling never left because there are still things the gender equality approach just cannot explain. The most famous is the “Nordic paradox”:where Scandinavian countries who are widely regarded to have the most gender-equal societies in the world also report some of the highest rates of sexual assault and gendered violence across the European Union. The frequent riposte is that Nordic women are better at recognising and reporting sexual violence,and while that might be true,it’s not clear enough to explain the data. It certainly doesn’t explain why,in a place like Iceland,which is consistently ranked the most gender-equal country on earth,every second murder is committed by a male partner:significantly higher than the EU average.
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Similarly,if gendered disrespect was the fundamental engine of domestic violence,we would expect to see much lower levels of it in same-sex relationships. But we don’t. CurrentAustralian statistics suggest that rates of domestic violence are similar or slightly higher in same-sex relationships compared to heterosexual relationships.
In factoring this out,you’d have to argue it’s a completely different,entirely parallel phenomenon that has nothing in common with heterosexual domestic violence,but which just so happens to occur with similar regularity and express itself in remarkably similar ways,running the now familiar gamut of coercive control,financial and emotional abuse and gaslighting. More plausible is that while there are some factors unique to same-sex and heterosexual cases respectively,their causes have much in common. An explanation that works only for one of them is unlikely to be much of an explanation at all.
Once disrespect becomes the heart of the argument,we begin connecting just about everything – and everyone – to violence. We’ve seen plenty of assertions that violence against women is the end of a continuum that begins with a sexist joke. We’ve seen pleas for men to “have the conversation”,unspecified as that directive may be,for the “good” men to set the “bad” men straight.